84 S. Park St, Oberlin

School business has started. I really regret being an EAS major, what a stupid major to be. I regret not having taken more substantive classes, things like Sociology, Women’s Studies, and Third World Studies. I simply didn’t come to college with that kind of focus. College was assumed to follow high school, no choice in the matter. What a waste.

Sakuko has started calling me, I wish she wouldn’t. Everything has changed and what’s in the past has passed. After we broke up, I wrote two nice letters to her and she didn’t respond. Her silence has set how I feel now and I don’t want to hear from her now. We can't resume something now. It’s too difficult.

Englewood Cliffs, NJ

My life has really fallen apart without my noticing it. Everything just went wrong and fell apart last semester. I have nothing. I had Sakuko and I lost her. Now I have nothing. No plans, no possibilities, no potential.

I really need to change. Before we broke up, I kept telling myself that I wouldn’t be the one to break up the relationship because I wasn’t sure whether I’d be doing it for real, legitimate reasons, or if it was because of my psychology. If it was my psychology, not only would it have been solely my fault, but it would be inevitable and I’d be responsible for putting Sakuko through shit that she nor nobody deserved.

It didn’t work, I ended up repressing a lot of bad feelings towards her and they’ve all been coming out since breaking up. It still was my psychology, there was no avoiding it. To me, “getting to know someone” means collecting their faults until my mind decides that they are too imperfect for me. Or rather that they are imperfect period. There were problems with the relationship, but there were more problems about me. And the problems about me probably caused the problems with the relationship.

There was probably little wrong with Sakuko. She was perfect for me in many ways. What more could I have asked for? She was devoted, kind, pretty, sexy, considerate, intelligent, caring. Good lord, what more am I asking for?

Instead I chose a perspective that emphasized her imperfections. It doesn’t have to be that way. It can’t be that way anymore or I’m doomed to be alone. How to change, I haven’t the slightest idea. I haven’t even a grasp on my problem.

Englewood Cliffs, NJ

There are two places I go to be alone with my thoughts. It depends on whether I want my mind on the inside or the outside. If I want my mind inside, I go to a mall. Disgusting institutions, so oppressive that I shut myself up in my own little head. The commercialism, greed, wealth, products, the desire and wanting. If I want my mind outside, I go to the cemetery. Then my mind can be free to stretch out as far as it wants and nothing bothers me in the cemetery. It’s peaceful and I’m surrounded by tombstones and human remains. My world stops in the cemetery. Today I went to the mall.

I went to a small, informal high school reunion this evening. I don’t know why I went, maybe to be more mature and pro-active about how I treat my past and facing it. It was awful and annoying and I’ll never look back at high school again.

I haven’t mentioned my gerbils at all. Weekend and Wreathe. In the waning days of August, Hershey was dying. I thought Hershey may have been dying of loneliness since Sesame had died recently. I didn’t want her to die alone, so I sent Myung Soo out to the pet store to get a companion, even if it would only last for a short while. The car wasn’t out of earshot when Hershey went into her death throes. It was heart-wrenching and she died in the palm of my hand.

When Myung Soo got back, I had to decide what to do with the new gerbil, whether to keep it or not. We decided it was fate and that I was meant to have these gerbils so I kept it and named him Wreathe and sent Myung Soo out again to get another one for companionship. Thus, Weekend.

Weekend and Wreathe mated a couple days before Sakuko and I broke up and they had babies on the morning of my Japanese exam, December 17. They had a lot of babies that I don’t know what to do with. Since then Weekend has developed some condition which makes her itch and she has scratched off a lot of her hair. She has these hideous bald spots, but she’s as chipper and active as ever. I can’t figure it out. She’s paranoid now, though. She used to climb onto my hand when I put it in the aquarium, but now she runs away. Wreathe is fine through all this and the babies also seem to have some sort of rash, but none of them got eaten as far as I can tell. That was gross.


Cute Sakuko with cute Sesame in Providence over the Summer.

Englewood Cliffs, NJ

I’ve been running the gamut of feelings towards Sakuko, even touching on rage and betrayal. It’s very confusing and hard to deal with. Oddly enough, at the same time I’m having very forgiving feelings towards family, perhaps Audrey's influence on me. We may not get along or even like each other, but I don’t sense any malice or double-dealing in this family. Not that I know this family.

My thoughts drift back to this past summer. A very hot July 4. The streets around Providence lined with cars. We had a barbecue that day with a bunch of Bob’s friends. The sun went down, they all went over to some park to watch the fireworks and I stayed at the apartment to read and watch some TV.

What a weird summer, I stayed with Bob and Tom, with family. I’m not particularly close to them. We’re familiar and I respect them and extend courtesies, but we’re not warm.

Why do they live together? Do they need each other in some way? Do they get support from each other from other family scars, or is it just practical to live together? If they did, it would be passively, no doubt. They are closer to each other than they are with me, meaning they are close enough to yell at each other. When Bob yelled at Tom, that took me totally by surprise. I couldn’t imagine either of them yelling at me that way. I wouldn’t give a shit if they did, maybe they know that.

Englewood Cliffs, NJ

I’m in the midst of attempting to de-personalize my room. I don’t feel any attachment to the years I’ve inhabited this room. Those years are so far away and belong to someone else. A lot of baggage, but none it is mine, none of it has anything to do with me. So I purge, throwing away anything posing as a part of me.

I noticed that when I left for college, no one did anything to make the room at least presentable. Is that a way of identifying the room as mine? It’s not, it should be a guest room, and when I return from college, perhaps the room is reserved for me, but as a guest.

It’s been a brutal semester. I just finished one of my Junior semesters, I’m not sure which one. A lot happened, but not a lot of substance to it. There weren’t any “main characters” who had major impacts on my life. Nothing positive happened.

I broke up with Sakuko on the day after Thanksgiving. It was a painful break up and now I’m doing everything just to get her out of my life for good. It’s permanent, no chance of getting back together. We thought it was something so special, so permanent, that it would last. We wrote to each other almost every day in the beginning.

She knit me a sweater that had come to symbolize something permanent, it was commitment and dedication. It was her heart that she put into that sweater. It’s those reminders that are so painful.

Nothing's permanent. Isn’t that the most obvious thing? I never went into a relationship with that attitude. Maybe I should and see what happens. Go into the relationship with the full expectation that it will only last for a few months or a year. No expectations of permanence.

I had been drifting from Sakuko for a while. It got exacerbated, I think, over fall break when I met up with my cousin Audrey. She came to the U.S. this summer for college and it was really weird, there was an immediate closeness. I know Sakuko noticed something about our closeness. For me, it emphasized the lack of closeness between us.

Audrey and I have met before, once when I was eleven and she was seven, and that was not a good scene at all. If anything, we should have been lifetime enemies. We met again when I was fourteen and she was ten and that time was much better. She forgave a lot. Now it looks like we’re really going to be friends.

The things that Sakuko said, I can’t believe she said those things. She was drunk and the deterioration of our relationship was very stressful, but the things she said really emphasized what little communication and understanding there is between us.

I feel like such a failure.

82 S. Park St, Oberlin OH

But we didn’t break up over the Summer. We kept at it for whatever reason; fear of being alone, fear of losing something that we thought was so good, sex, not wanting to make all our efforts and sacrifices go in vain. Now it seems clear that all we’ve done since the Summer is postpone a break-up. We were resisting something that was definitely going down.

It’s the same pattern. It’s my fault, I know. I pull someone in as hard and as close as possible, but when it gets too close and expectations change, I bail. There’s nothing wrong with Sakuko. The faults I find are perfectly human, I make them into something huge and unacceptable. I don’t know why.

What am I learning from all this? Why am I so stupid? Couldn’t I have foreseen this? Why do I do what I do? We didn’t really connect, even in the beginning. It was just attraction, nothing special, a decision perhaps more of the mind than the heart. I never sensed that she was interested in my life or aware of my situations. Her attention was so much on superficial things, not substantive things.

I don’t want my life just to be ordinary, conforming to social molds. I don’t want to be in a relationship just to be in one. I don’t want to live life just to live it, I want to get something out of it, it has to have meaning and connection. I want to explore and enrich my life and that includes the people I’m close to.

What a myth! I’m my own myth. I grew up thinking that I’m special. My parents’ neglect didn’t bring me down in my eyes, it lifted me up. I’m a survivor. I compensated for my parents’ treatment and built my own pride and survived by maintaining a high self-esteem.

But I’m so ordinary, I can’t do anything well, I can’t make anything work. I’m nothing, a loser by my own assessment. The irony is that to survive, I perpetuated an illusion. To survive I needed something I can’t live with. I have to deconstruct myself.

It’s done. It couldn’t have been more painful. I have no idea where my life is going. I’m lost, comfortably numb, crazy. I think I want to be alone. Just for several years.



That’s it, the end, goodbye Sakuko.

Providence, RI

For some reason I’ve always thought that people only lost me. I’ve always thought that I don’t lose people and that I never got so attached to people that I could “lose” them. I’ve always thought that I’ve been invulnerable to that and that I could just let them go. I’ve always been grateful for that insensitivity. But that’s exactly what it’s turning out to be - an insensitivity, a numbness, a deadness.

I have lost a lot of people, people that I didn’t want to lose, people that I chased away. I keep building a life around people who get close to me. I make it feel so permanent and plan the future and then I go and topple and destroy it.

Sakuko and I are breaking up. It was really weird, too. We just sat down and decided to separate. I don’t want to but I don’t want to turn back now. I have a pain, a growing loneliness inside me. A severe self-destructive hate. I’ve betrayed all that I’m supposed to be true to. I’ve breached my own truths and living a great delusion. I’m slipping again, maybe I didn’t get so much better last Summer. Or it was just another illusion.

Providence, RI

I grew up alone, even though parents are both alive and together and never even encountered a marriage threatening situation. I have two older brothers, neither of whom were particularly rebellious and I shared a room with one of them most of my life. Growing up alone made me crave attention or at least the company of others. But with the likes of them, I turned out really choosy of the people I let get close to me.

So I’ve always had the dilemma of wanting people around and at the same time I’ve been fiercely protective of my personal space. I feel crowded when someone gets close and then I go running back to being alone. And while I’m alone, I always imagine someone else there and I want to be sharing things with someone else.

But I hate people getting too close without getting to know me. And I don’t think Sakuko knows me, even after all this time.

Providence, RI

Sakuko is my girlfriend, but she doesn’t feel like she’s a focus in my life. There’s a problem in that. I think I missed again.

A year ago, I think I would have killed myself for an answer. Six months ago I think I would have entered a monastery to search for an answer. I probably would have entered one to not search for an answer. Now I don’t even have the drive to find an answer. I’m alive and here because of Sakuko, but I’m only here.

I don’t know if Sakuko and I are moving apart, it feels like we are, but it also feels like we aren’t. I’m numb again, putting it down and not taking it too seriously. And I can tell that she doesn’t like how things are changing. There’s a growing tension between us.

Rob and Lizzie left for a vacation today. They are driving down South, something I totally don’t comprehend.

Providence, RI

I’m in Providence now. I came up on June 7, and have been here since. I went down to New Jersey once for a dentist appointment and to take Sesame to a vet. Sesame died on July 5th. The sweetest gerbil in the world, I’ll never forget her. Even though I thought she was a he (hint: boy gerbils can't have baby gerbils).



I’m taking a Women’s Studies course at Brown which has been harrowing with constant readings and weekly essays. A good course; very enlightening. An introductory Women’s Studies course should be requisite for any liberal arts degree. It has me thinking about other forms of injustice - oppression, sexism, racism, exploitation, objectification, imperialism, misogyny - basically, the history of the world.

Why don’t I have ambitious goals and admirable ideas? Instead, I question the material trappings of causes and I don’t have any goals.

I’m an introvert. I have been all my life. I’ve always been self-conscious of how I appear and have always seen my situations from a slight distance, slightly removed from myself. I don’t react spontaneously, everything is at least slightly premeditated, no bubbling emotions pouring over. No animal instinct, no blind passion.

At the same time, I don’t have much of a view of myself. I have no conception of how I look in my surroundings and around other people. It’s like I don’t exist to myself. I can’t place what I see in the mirror within the physical scenery I see around me.

Always right behind my eyes is the question of the meaning of life. Yes, really. Just sitting around, looking at my legs and feeling them, I feel the control, I feel that they are part of me. I see the muscles moving to move my toes and I have complete control and that’s . . . fascinating. I’m doing that, those muscles are mine.

What is the process manifested in that movement? What happens between thought and movement and how? I’m not talking about the medical or mechanical explanation. How is the will transmitted and then manifested in movement and is there any meaning in it? I see the movement, but I have no idea what is the nature of the cause of the will of that movement, the truth behind it.

I’m looking for the significance of living in this form with this history and reality. I think it’s fairly clear that this is not reality as far as understanding absolutes go. Then why am I caught so much in this material world? But how can I have goals, ambitions, and plans in a world whose meaning I question, whose reality I question?

I know this isn’t real, but I don’t have anything with which to replace this concept of reality. How can I want to do something in this life without having solved, resolved, or come to grips with the problem of why am I here? How can I do anything for other people if I can’t even liberate myself? Is my status as a human deserved? Is my need to ponder the problem of meaning earned?

Englewood Cliffs, NJ

It does strike me. It does hurt, what happened, but nothing can be changed. Warning signs sounded, and things just didn’t click anyway, they stopped clicking after the first month or two. I became too dominant. I don’t want to dominate in a relationship, there needs to be balance.

I don’t like the upper hand in a power play and that’s what relationships are or become. I hate it when the other person starts sacrificing too much of their personalities in order to accommodate my wants, needs, and, eventually, my whims.

I can’t deal with it when it feels like it’s becoming all about me. I want the person I love to just be themselves and not feel a need to accommodate me. Am I that scary to get along with? Is the problem me? Will it happen with Sakuko? It has been a pattern so far, and the relationship gets dull when I call all the shots and everything is about making me happy. That doesn’t make me happy.

Oberlin, OH

Life is suffering.

It’s been over a year since the first entry in this journal. I figure a year from now, maybe I’d want to see what I was doing a year ago.

This past semester at Oberlin was pretty bad overall. I fucked up again and my graduation might be delayed. Again. I don’t know, I don’t really care. I spent Commencement Week here with Sakuko. I took her back to Columbus yesterday. The steel drum band has its traditional, pre-Commencement Illumination gig tonight, and then I leave for New Jersey. I’m going to be doing Summer School at Brown and staying at Bob’s. After Sakuko’s Summer session, she’ll probably come to Providence to stay for a while; see more of the U.S.



My romantic life is perfect. My academics are in shambles. My social life is non-existent. Family life is the same shit. Mentally I’m numb, confused, also happy. Oh, I guess that sort of sums it up. I really think my mental health is better now; there is a difference. Not perfect, no need to be. It’s pretty much where I want it. I still would rather be dead, but I can deal with being alive. I am sort of disgusted with myself but I don’t feel things as extremely as I did at the beginning of the year. I still hate people, people still suck, but I can’t say that I’ve gotten close to anyone except Sakuko.

Englewood Cliffs, NJ

The semester has ended. A melancholy bit to look back to. Looking back a few years more and I can’t believe that I was in the woods for three years. The difference being out of them is so vivid. All my journals from that earlier time have been burned. We made a little event of it at the end of the semester in the Third World House lounge fireplace. Kim burned writings, I tossed in my story so far.

And here I am, in love and a little diverted from my struggles and goals but satisfied overall at my progress.

I’ll have a single next semester. I was supposed to have one this past semester but I gave it up, BIG mistake, to help out Ching Ching. Idiot. Sakuko is coming to Ohio in March. She’ll be studying for a year in Columbus. This is the longest relationship I’ve been in and there’s a good reason why - she’s in Japan, I’m in Ohio.

I can only wonder how things will work when we’re put together. I keep wondering what’s keeping it alive. I wonder whether I can really love. I have to try to make it work. I have to tolerate and absolutely not test her. If I do the test thing, forget it. My defenses are so perfected that they won’t allow anyone through. I have to prove this to myself that I’m not fucked up anymore.

Third World House, Oberlin OH

What shambles my life has fallen into. I got a loving and endearing letter from Sakuko. We write to each other all the time, almost everyday I send something off to her and receive something from her. It’s really wonderful and it’s hard to believe I can put so much of my heart and soul into a person. The girl from all those songs.

If we hadn’t fallen in love, the rest of my life would be set. I don’t think she’s changed anything but she’s making it a lot more difficult. But I have to wonder if this is only working because it’s a long distance relationship and we don’t have to deal with the daily stresses of being together. I tend to get sick of people I get close to. Would this be any different?

What vow can I make to Sakuko that will last? I’ve gone through this before and have always proven fallible, false. Have I made all the vows I can and failed them all? I will make no vows. She isn’t life itself. She isn’t the sun, the moon, and stars. She isn’t the perfect woman or the girl from all those songs. Sakuko just is and we are just us and now we are together.

Asia House, Oberlin OH

It depends on what you call “living”.

Maybe the world isn’t in a decline, it’s just that the problems have grown more complex, more sophisticated, more widespread, less noticeable. It scares me to think that someday I would decide I want to live my life and betray my dissatisfaction and anger at mankind. To be one of the millions that say nothing and nobody hears, to be one of millions of just ordinary people. Living life just for the material pleasures. How revolting, and here I am in a relationship with Sakuko. Is it doomed because I am? It’s a matter of values, isn’t it? Would to be happy with Sakuko fulfill my criteria for really living? No idea.

Asia House, Oberlin OH

What? It’s been less than a month since I last wrote in here and how things change! It’s the third and last week of the Japan program and I’ve acquired a girlfriend. Best made plans having been laid waste. I need some perspective on this relationship. I know what my world is, it has shown itself quite clearly. My life is me, here and now. Everything in my life I’ve drawn to me for a reason and the result isn’t exactly positive. So where does Sakuko fit in? A positive element in a life spinning out of control and liking it that way. How can I be so very stupid?

Is she just a passing triviality? No one is until they’re gone, but comes a time when they are gone and anything I might write or think about the strength or enduring nature of a love is easily invalidated. I don’t want to feel that insecurity. How long is this going to last? I just want this love to be, no analysis, no investigating reactions, just let it be. A girlfriend now is the last thing I need but I can’t bear to just turn around and chuck it away.